Web businesses that rely on free labor and crowdsourcing to survive are in for a rude awakening, says Andrew Keen, journalist, author and self-proclaimed hater of all things free.
“Is $0.00 really the future of labor in an age of mass unemployment?” Keen writes in a recent blog post. “Of course not.”
“The basic point is that free labor is fine when everyone’s got a lot of money and they’re employed, but when they start getting laid off, I think people’s attitude towards money changes,” Keen said in an interview with Wired.com. His book, Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture speaks volumes in the title alone.
In the interest of full disclosure it must be said that Keen strongly disagrees with the free economic model espoused by Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson in the pages of the magazine and in an upcoming book.
Keen opined Tuesday in an Internet Evolution blog post that the current economic downturn will pop the open source, Web 2.0 bubble and sites that depend on the kindness of strangers for content like Wikipedia and The Huffington Post will start to see a decline in user participation.
“It will mean the success of Knol over Wikipedia, Mahalo over Google, theatlantic.com over the HuffingtonPost.com, iTunes over MySpace, Hulu over YouTube Inc., Playboy.com over Voyeurweb.com, TechCrunch over the blogosphere, CNN’s professional journalism over CNN’s iReporter citizen-journalism,” he writes.
Keen mentioned Mahalo as an example of a company that “gets it right.”
But he has a different opinion of the microblogging site Twitter, whose investors recently mentioned plans to implement a business strategy in
2009.
“For a company like Twitter to announce that they might develop a business model next year, seems to me to be particularly absurd. You think they’d have more urgency in this economy,” he said.
“It’s a legacy of the old world. What’s happening is we’re in a twilight period right now between the old and the new world, and companies like Twitter are legacy companies,” he said, noting that this does not necessarily mean that these companies will close up shop. Self-indulgences at 140 characters at a time don't require much of an investment at a time.
But he does think, in the media realm, that Ariana Huffington’s content model could be dicey.
“If you’re a movie star in Santa Monica, or if you’re a powerful
Washington insider, you’re still going to contribute your piece to The Huffington Post, but I think there are a lot of people, academics people who are losing their savings, who are going to be much less comfortable about just giving away articles,” he said, reaffirming his main point that the "cult of free" chapter in the history of the internet is finished.
“Your Wired readers will probably disagree but I think it’s a credible position given the current situation,” he said.
So do you agree?
